I-Net Bridge, the Johannesburg-based provider of economic, financial market and corporate data that is part of listed media group Avusa, has set 2014 as the target year to finish a complete revamp of its technologies.
Malcolm MacDonald, Chief Information Officer at I-Net Bridge, says the company has built up a formidable client base of more than 300 leading financial services and investment institutions, making it imperative for the company to manage the risk of its ageing systems.
I-Net Bridge offers its clients live prices, data, sophisticated research tools and breaking news from South Africa and more than 30 major international markets. The financial data vendor's flagship financial products include I-Net Station and I-Graph, with I-Net Equity Consensus Forecast numbers seen as an industry standard among analysts and portfolio managers.
I-Net Bridge's reputation for providing quality market data and news over the past 22 years has earned it numerous accolades, including: being voted as a Superbrand in South Africa in both the 2007/2008 and 2012/2013; and being awarded the Boutique Star in the 2012 Mail and Guardian Top Companies Reputation Index Awards.
“Our current set of systems are ageing and the period from 2011-2014 will see a complete revamp of our technologies,” MacDonald says, highlighting significant strides the company has made since January 2011 in its revamp efforts.
“We have converted our messaging layer to new technologies. We have virtualised over 70% of our servers on leading virtualisation and SAN technologies, resulting in two separate fault tolerant environments. We have built a new state-of-the-art data centre and migrated our production systems to that facility,” MacDonald says.
“We have successfully migrated to the new JSE trading system and leveraged that change to migrate to some leading technologies for receiving data from exchanges. We have also updated most of our internal productivity tools and partly optimised our internal operations,” he says.
MacDonald says the shift to mobile has completely changed the way the company develops its new products. “The technologies are different, and the approach is different. We are developing products such that the user's profile primarily defines the product they are using, and that product can be accessed on any platform,” he says.
The company is changing its underlying technology to keep pace with the huge strides that have been made in analytical tools in the last five years, and ensure customer satisfaction.
“To this end, we are aligning with Microsoft and Google on the data side. On the user side of the equation, we saw one of our competitors build an awesome Web-based terminal at great expense that its subscribers didn't embrace. So we are definitely including a selection of our subscribers in the creation process to ensure that it is easy to use, and not only meets their needs, but also makes their lives easier on a day-to-day basis,” MacDonald says.
MacDonald says there are a number of elements differentiating I-Net from the larger global players:
* Firstly, we are the dominant local player in market data; we are proudly South African.
* The way our products are used differs from some of the premium players' products: our software typically runs on each subscriber's desktop, while some of the premium terminals are shared by a group of subscribers. This enables our subscribers to set up and get "comfortable" with their configuration and layouts in our products. (This feature brings with it the challenge of ensuring that our products work across a wide range of system configurations.)
* We also cover local markets, local companies and local news more deeply than an international player that is covering the whole world.
* We are usually much more cost-effective.
In addition, MacDonald says I-Net Bridge's blade-server infrastructure allows it to be very flexible by growing its operating capacity quickly to accommodate growing message volumes.
“Fault tolerance and redundancy are simplified, as well as troubleshooting. If a particular event caused a data anomaly, we can create a separate environment very quickly and 'replay' the day in another environment to check and test our calculations,” he adds.
“A feature of this industry is that behaviours can change quickly and market data providers must find appropriate ways to record and represent those market activities very quickly. The new data centre and high-density servers have also helped us to halve the wasted power and the cooling power consumed by our data centre,” MacDonald says.
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